Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:36:40 -0800 From: Julian Elischer <julian@freebsd.org> To: John Kozubik <john@kozubik.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Steven Hartland <killing@multiplay.co.uk> Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle Message-ID: <4F15BFB8.8020608@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1201162157050.19710@kozubik.com> References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1112211415580.19710@kozubik.com> <C63F1F85E57D4717B712ACA28BFD2D0C@multiplay.co.uk> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1201162157050.19710@kozubik.com>
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On 1/16/12 10:20 PM, John Kozubik wrote: > > > On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Steven Hartland wrote: > >>> I was disappointed to see that 8.3-RELEASE is now slated to come >>> out in March of 2012. This will be ~13 months since 8.2-RELEASE >>> and is typical of a trend towards longer gaps between minor releases. >> >> ... >> >> I must say as a small company that runs ~200 machines on FreeBSD >> I do see where John is coming from, as it is very time consuming to >> keep >> things up to date and new is not always better e.g. we still have >> boxes >> stuck on 6.x as issues introduced in the Linux compat after that >> caused >> problems. >> >> That said I'm in two minds as the features that have been brought >> in by >> the more rapid dev cycle like ZFS have been great. > > > The features are great - nobody doesn't want the features! Like I > said in the original post, as wonderful as ZFS on FreeBSD is (and we > are deploying it this year) it is only now (well, in March) with 8.3 > that I feel it is finally safe and stable enough to bet the farm > on. I'm not the only one that feels this way. > > If that's the case, then, ZFS could have been developed just as it > has, in a development branch, and not been used as justification for > (mutiple) major releases and all of their disruption. but it would not have gotten the testing it did. > > As I said in the original post - we should be on 6.12 right now, and > bringing out 7.0, with ZFS v28. that was my feeling when we went to this "bring out a new major release every 3 weeks" scheme. We must however look at why Major and Minor releases are different. A major release means that kernel ABIs (inside the system) have changed. We needed to change the ABIs between 4 and 5 for sure (threaded kernel) and between 6 and 7 for sure, (second round of threading work). 7 and 8 also really required a change. I'm not sure about 5-6 and 8-9.
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